Follow two abolitionists who fought one of the most shockingly persistent evils of the world:  human trafficking and sexual exploitation of slaves. Told in alternating chapters from perspectives spanning more than a century apart, read the riveting 19th century first-hand account of Harriet Jacobs and the modern-day eyewitness account of Timothy Ballard. Harriet Jacobs was an African-American, born into slavery in North Carolina in 1813. She

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"Commanding a vast historiography of slavery and emancipation, Aline Helg argues that significant numbers of enslaved Africans and their descendants across the entire Western Hemisphere managed to free themselves hundreds of years before the formation of white-run abolitionist movements. Her analysis of resistance and struggle covers more than three centuries, from early colonization to the American and Haitian revolutions, Spanish American independence,...

When William Kite runs away to sea to escape a charge of muder, he finds himself aboard the Enterprize, a Liverpool Guineaman, or slave ship, destined for the Guinea coast of West Africa. Having loaded the slaves the ship then prepares to cross the Atlantic, bound for the sugar plantations of the West Indies.

First published by UNC Press in 1972, Sugar and Slaves presents a vivid portrait of English life in the Caribbean more than three centuries ago. Using a host of contemporary primary sources, Richard Dunn traces the development of plantation slave society in the region. He examines sugar production techniques, the vicious character of the slave trade, the problems of adapting English ways to the tropics, and the appalling mortality rates for both blacks...

As the foremost white West Indian writer of this century and author of the widely acclaimed novel Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys (1890-1979) has attracted much critical attention, most often from the perspective of gender analysis. Veronica Gregg extends our critical appreciation of Rhys by analyzing the complex relationship between Rhys's identity and the structures of her fiction, and she reveals the ways in which this relationship is connected to...

Examines the political, social, and economic forces which have shaped the history of the entire West Indian area since the fifteenth century.